If I understand a report in today’s Guardian correctly (and if Benjamin Haas, the Guardian reporter, has outlined the issue correctly) South Korean law does not take geography as its basis, but rather citizenship.

Every other legal jurisdiction that I have heard of bases itself on geography. This difference has immense implications for what we think about the relationship between citizens, the state, and the legal framework that adjudicates between them.

Since the middle of 2002 I have been engaged in producing and creating a large-scale project that began as an attempt to create an online synthetic world, and moved swiftly into the more interesting attempt to model a synthetic culture.

This has involved the creation of a space in the world (an island in the southern Mediterranean) and the attempt to fill this space with a geography, history, economy and ethics that together form the kind of narrative that one would expect to find when reading a real culture. In doing this we have posited “culture” as the continual reading and rereading of a number of contending narratives, whose relative importance, and believability, waxes and wanes over time.